


Dreams

by ELG



Series: Friends With Benefits [1]
Category: X-Men (Original Timeline Movies)
Genre: F/M, Femdom, M/M, Rape Nightmare, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-08
Updated: 2015-11-08
Packaged: 2018-04-30 16:20:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5170391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ELG/pseuds/ELG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set just after Logan gets back from Alkali Lake at the beginning of X2.</p><p>Logan has a nightmare about Mystique using his form. This time she is planning to do more than just stab Scott.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreams

1\. Dreams

Sometimes his nightmares were as deep as the ocean; they dragged him down to the sea bed where no light could find him and they anchored him there like a storm-wrecked galleon. He was the beast who couldn’t break free, trapped in a body that wasn’t his. He was fluid as water; he was Logan, and then he was Mystique playing Logan in her own dark drama; every actor distorted by mirrors and the play-script maddened by memories lost.

He was a man with a wary beast inside and then he was Raven…raging blue beneath the surface of his borrowed shape, yellow eyes hidden beneath the wolf-light of his hazel gaze. She walked in his body but with high, arched feet, every step unfolding silently on the thick pile, toes as delicate as the fingers of a piano player. He had never learned to glide like this, her panther prowl more menacing than his head tilted swagger, as he was her, briefly, hearing the beat of her heart, feeling the warning flex of her fingers…then he was himself again but powerless; following her from awkward doorways, slinking in convenient shadows as he tried to trail her, ghostly and formless, and then he was Mystique again, wearing his body like a skintight suit, her shadow a Logan-shaped lie. One of the kids, seeking a glass of water in the middle of the night, smiled tentatively at this fake Logan as she passed him and Logan’s face smiled back, too bright and too wide. _That isn’t me_. He tried to say it but his voice had been stolen along with his strength. He couldn’t make anyone hear him or see him. Mystique had stolen his voice and his face and his form. He wasn’t even an echo, just a voyeur who could only watch.

Her prey was close and he smelled it before she did, a tame aftershave, something safe in a bottle, only ever splashed on sparingly because her victim was used to living around friends with enhanced senses. His skin smelled of his own shower gel and Jean’s soap, a few faint bruises bleeding quietly to themselves beneath the skin. Late night Danger Room session, too slow in the first pass so he had made himself do it over and over again, because pain didn’t matter, precision mattered, accuracy mattered, efficiency mattered. He needed to do better. In the dream, Logan could pick up Scott’s thoughts like radio; they were ordered and reasoned and ever so slightly not sane.

There was a sudden lurch, like he was looking through a camera whose tripod was tilting drunkenly, time lapses jumping, and suddenly Scott was in the bedroom by himself, no sign of Jean, wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt, the window open and a cool breeze licking in. Scott was futzing about with the kids’ homework, sitting on the side of the bed, barefoot, with a pen in one hand, marking papers. He looked up in surprise and said, “Logan? Are you okay?” His voice sounded echoey and strange, like it was coming from a different room, filtered through a grating. His face was blurry and then in sudden sharp focus as blue light found the curve of his cheekbone, the angle of his jaw. The light settled in the hollow of his collarbone and licked its way along the bone.

Logan tried to shout out that it wasn’t Logan, that Logan-shaped body looming over him, but someone far more dangerous and full of rage because it was their fault Magneto was locked in his plastic prison and their fault the world wasn’t filled with mutant leaders now. Nothing came out of his mouth but an animal moan while Mystique was purring out Logan-words to pacify:

“I’m fine, Scott. And so are you.”

Scott frowned, put down the paper he was marking, put the pen back in its holder on his bedside table, said, “Logan…?”

“Mighty fine.”

_No! Don’t!_

He tried to grapple her down but he fell straight through her. Mystique was swift and savage and Scott had thought he was talking to someone who didn’t hate him so he was unprepared for the vicious punch and the extravagant backhand. And this couldn’t be real, Scott was faster than this, but the blows were so hard, and she knocked him about for the fun of it, then beat him down like she meant it, wearing Logan’s smile on Logan’s face while Scott struggled to stay conscious and asked Logan why he was doing this with a heart-tearing break in his voice.

He was the helpless wraith looking over her shoulder as Mystique grabbed Scott and dragged him. The silver glint of metal and she was handcuffing him to the bed. She hit him again, just because and the blood ran red from his mouth before she swooped in and licked at the crimson flow, licked down, licked in, as her fingers tightened on his throat and choked him with a feral smile, and Logan was tasting him and the salt-iron of his blood, the open edge of his wound, kissing the heated bruise she had left on one high cheekbone, holding his face still mercilessly when he tried to struggle, forcing his mouth open, her tongue in.

“Ever been fucked by a man before, Cyclops?”

“Don’t do this, Logan. You don’t want to do this.”

“I’ve been wanting to do it since I first saw you. This was just the first time I managed to get you alone.”

 _Don’t believe her, Scott. Know it isn’t me_.

The clothes tore like tissue paper and she had him laid out naked for the taking and even the bruises around his ribcage were beautiful, in pretty, spreading shades of red and blue, as Mystique bent and kissed them mockingly, dragging Logan with her so he had no choice but to breathe in Scott’s scent and feel him flinch as Mystique was rough with him in Logan’s form, dragging his head up for more brutal kisses, squeezing his throat until it was ringed with finger-shaped bruises, then biting her way down his body like it was hers to command, his hair trailing along Scott’s silk-smooth skin, his beard reddening it as he nipped and bit and Scott flinched everywhere he touched.

He tried to say: _Don’t. Please, don’t. Not as you and not as me._ But the words wouldn’t come, just a rasp of sound, less than human, like all he was now was an animal with the speech stolen from his throat. She made them both suck Scott’s limp, resisting cock, slicking her finger with spittle before she worked it into his ass. Logan could feel Scott flinching, but it was as if he was made of water or a fall of light. When he reached out to help, he went right through him and then he was jolted back into Mystique pretending to be him, and his finger was in Scott’s ass, stretching him, hurting him, caressing him mockingly and his mouth was on his so-unwillingly hardening cock, tasting of soap and salt, and it was his voice Mystique was using to purr into Scott’s groin that he wanted it, wanted this, always had, always would, uptight prissy little whore.

_Stop doing this!_

The words were trapped in his head, rattling around uselessly in the pinball machine of his adamantium wrapped brain.

Mystique kissed Scott savagely, blood flow heating, bruising him with Logan’s mouth, hands firm behind his head, caressing his neck, kissing him mockingly, teasingly, telling him she would make him want it. The picture tilted again, juddered.

He was aching and dripping and he could have stopped her – just for a second, if he just wrenched himself free of the dream – but he was feeling her blood burning with want in his veins, Scott’s taste on his tongue. The slick push of his cock into Scott’s tight, unwilling heat, and it slid in as if it was a key into a lock, like it was always meant to fit. Scott cried out, arched away, but was pinned down hard and forced to take it, more of it, all of it, every brutal inch. Scott was naked warmth and heated skin beneath him, and Logan’s hand was cruel on his mouth, holding the stifled sounds in as his hips snapped and their flesh met and met again like two hands clapping, heat to heat, sweat-sticky skin making beautiful friction, his balls beating a tattoo on that flinching butt. Scott was a writhing perfection of lean planes, bone curves and taut, hard muscles; skin so hot and silky beneath his tongue and his fingers and the heavy press of his flesh, smelling of Jean and jasmine and aftershave and soap and the faint tang of engine oil from the bike Logan had stolen. Hot throb of gears grinding, pistons pumping, heat between his legs, screaming into the dark, wind-stolen sounds, stifled and muffled and tongue-forced back down his panting throat. He was roaring around every bend, a brutal act of theft and Scott was taking it and taking it as he opened the throttle wider – and it wasn’t Mystique any more, it was him. It was him.

 

Logan roared up, gasping, into the dark room, claws out, coming like a kid’s first wet dream, coming from his worst nightmare as he shivered and shivered, as the semen cooled and he felt his arms, felt his chest, dug in a thumbnail to see if he was truly himself, to see if the blood spurted deep enough to hurt and the skin closed over. He was Logan. He was Logan and he hadn’t lost himself or hurt anyone. He hadn’t raped Scott. Sniffing the air desperately, as his heart raced, the air confirmed it, no scent of him anywhere, not on the bed or on Logan’s skin. He hadn’t been anywhere near Scott. Still, he sprang up, restless and shaking, as he pulled on some sweatpants and clenched his fists so he could feel the metal beneath the skin. Then he was bending over, wondering if he was going to hurl from the taste of that imagined blood in his mouth, hands running through his hair because, fuck Mystique, fuck her and fuck the dark places in his mind that mocked him. There were whispers in there that tried to tell him he had done terrible things, a beast locked up inside him that the right words could still unleash.

Slamming his fist against the wall, Logan said harshly, “I am not that guy. I’m not who he was. I’m not the things he did.” _I would never do that to Scott_. “And I’d kill anyone who tried!”

That shocked him out of his sleep-drunk rage at his own subconscious. That had sounded as angry and as adamant as a rockslide; a red wave rising up; even though Summers wasn’t his friend and Logan had not signed up to be his protector. He turned away from it, wishing vainly for a beer, and then realized he had to see for himself, damnit. Had to see that Mystique wasn’t in the mansion and Summers wasn’t handcuffed to his goddamned bed being ass-raped by a shape-shifter wearing Logan’s face, because what if the stupid son-of-a-bitch really was that easy to take; what if he really would just sit there, looking up at Logan cluelessly, frowning a little, as a monster loomed over him and tightened its fist. He had to be sure.

Dragging the door open angrily, Logan sprang into the corridor, needing to prowl and pace a little before he peered through the hinge of Scott’s door. And he knew just how that was going to look – like he was the guy who wanted to sniff Jean’s underwear – and knowing exactly how it was going to look should have been enough to stop that irrational voice in his head urging him to do it. But the dream had done its work too well. Fuck Mystique and her freaky shape-shiftery and fuck Summers for looking like that naked and running around in skintight black leather so every bad guy out there could work out what he looked like naked. Whose dumbass idea had that been anyway? Damn everyone to hell.

“Because now I’m a fucking peeping tom,” he growled and then he was prowling along the corridors of a school with sleeping kids behind every door, needing to get a look in Scott Summers’ bedroom to see if he was okay. _I hate my life_ , he thought, and wondered why he hadn’t shown the sense to stay at the concrete-covered emptiness of Alkali Lake, just him and a stray gray wolf in a moment of quiet communion, with no kids, and no craziness, no woman who didn’t really want him quite enough, and absolutely no Scott frickin’ Summers.

 

It’s a cold, dark street, every streetlight has failed and the stars are too far away to be looking. Around the edge of the abandoned warehouse, across the unlit street there is a neon sign winking on and winking off somewhere in a red spectrum. Vacancies. The world is filled with vacancies. Some of them are trying to legislate against his people even now.

The wind cuts in around the corner, carrying a tumbling of damp cardboard and a skittish plastic bag on its breath. Out of the corner of his eye they could be very small circus performers, running their gymnastic routine in the gutter. He has disciplined his naturally gawky, naturally clumsy body into tightly controlled fitness. He has taught it to relax into a fall, and flip into a back somersault where he can guarantee that he will always land on the X. He is not the boy who used to feel that shiver down his spine as he walked down this alleyway from the bus stop, the fear rising higher with every pace. There is no need to be afraid, not because there is no beating awaiting him any more at the end of that street, but because he has taught himself not be afraid of a mere beating. Life is pain. Life is struggle. Sometimes there are small victories.

The men round the corner and he’s ready for them this time, even for Jack. He sends the beams angling off the walls, short, controlled, just hard enough to put them down, not smash them to atoms. He knows what he’s doing. He is not that scared, skinny kid.

And then Jack is in his head. It’s okay. He’s been taught by the best to keep telepaths away from what matters, and the others are up sooner than he thought they would be but that’s okay, too, because he is trained in hand to hand. He chops, spins, kicks, ducks, punches. A few blows get through his defenses. They are harder than expected but that’s okay, too, because he isn’t fifteen any more, and he can take it.

_You owe me!_

_I own you!_

_I’ll beat you until it’s all you know!_

His control is slipping a little, the men are getting up faster, punching much harder. He is still keeping his grace but the pressure is rising, and he can’t touch Jack. Jack is diamond. He is too hard to touch – with pleas for mercy, or flinches, or even the reason of his criminal friends that he’s gonna kill the kid if he carries on like that, and then what use will he be? They don’t need another corpse to dump. They need a way to get into the vault, damnit, Jack… The red, focused beams just bounce off him and his diamond skin, the way everything always has. And then they’re on him, Jack’s on him, and he’s beating him with his adamant fists, smashing Scott down onto the sidewalk, into the gutter, where he belongs, because he’s worthless whining gene-freak trash –

“Scott!”

Scott jolted awake and found Jean was gently shaking him.

“It was just a bad dream,” she told him, but he hated the ache he had put in her voice. She was the one who had been restless since Liberty Island; she was the one with the nightmares that had sometimes proven so powerful they had thrown him across the room. The one night she was managing to have a good night’s sleep and he had to wake her up with his tired old traumas.

“I’m sorry,” he kissed her back apologetically.

She stroked his hair back from his forehead as moonlight streamed in through the window sending an elongated square of blue across the carpet. The windows in the orphanage had let in bars of light as well. He had lost count of the times he had woken up more weary than when he had fallen asleep, or woken up abruptly in the middle of the night, only to find Nate watching him sleep, not fondly or protectively, just obsessively and creepily. Nate hadn’t been emotionally capable of loving him although he had resented the way Scott never could love him back; Nate had just wanted to keep Scott as his own property that he didn’t have to share with anyone else. He’d found Lefty easier to deal with; at least he’d just punched Scott for no reason on a regular basis and encouraged other boys to do the same. That had probably been the perfect training for waking up to a world that wanted to kill him just for being born a mutant.

“Sometimes I want to go into your mind and wipe them all away: all the bullies at the orphanage, and Sinister, and Winters and his thugs, and Stryker and his experiments.”

“It doesn’t matter.” He breathed her in because scents were important when he might have to negotiate a place with his eyes closed and the inside of his eyelids a pulsing red. She smelled of honeysuckle soap and oranges and jasmine, sweet and strong. A scent of summer lingering even after the sun had gone down. He hooked her hair back behind one ear so he could breathe in the silky perfume of her neck. “Although – perhaps that’s why Logan doesn’t remember anything that happened more than fifteen years ago. Maybe someone was trying to be kind to him and all they did was leave him with a lot of unanswered questions.”

There was an odd restraint in her voice as she said, “For someone you claim not to like, you do talk about him a lot.”

“He and I need to do better than we’re doing if we’re going to work together. I need to stop resenting him and suck it up. The guy saved our asses on Liberty Island – twice. I just can’t quite work out how to incorporate him into the team strategies yet. Maybe I need to run more simulations.”

“I think you spent more than enough time playing with an imaginary Logan in the Danger Room while he was away. I think you need to play a lot fewer games with Fake Logan and a lot more games with Real Me.”

Her telekinesis on his chest pushing him down was firm and caused him just a flicker of simultaneous unease at how strong her powers were making her these days and embarrassing old arousal. Then he decided boldly that he didn’t have to be embarrassed about being turned on by his own girlfriend and wasn’t going to be, so there, even if his cock getting hard like that was him failing to have perfect control over a part of his own body; he would make up for it tomorrow in the Danger Room by having extra control over the other parts. She straddled him and he looked up at her limpidly, sending the thought daringly down their mental connection that he hoped she wasn’t expecting him to start fighting for his virtue. He was only having that fight with her if he had a guarantee going in that she would be winning.

She mocked him teasingly: _Why, Mr. Summers, and on a school night, too…._

Only under torture would he have admitted that the Jean who woke up in the night from dark dreams and tossed him around with her mind was even sexier than the one who hadn’t made the windows rattle. He saw her expression take on that rapt, hungry look where she briefly looked as wild and beautiful as a bird of prey and his body stilled in readiness for her pounce. She pinned his wrists down and he opened his mouth willingly but then she was tearing herself away with reluctance.

“You haven’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks, Scott. I’m getting you some hot chocolate.”

“Because I’m six…?”

“Because hot chocolate followed by vigorous healthy exercise should put anyone into a nice, dreamless sleep, even you.”

He kept his face earnest and dull. “So, we’re having a workout in the Danger Room? Because you know I’m always up for that.”

She pulled on his clean shirt, the one he had hung carefully on the back of the chair, ready for the morning, buttoning it up slowly so he could see the way it hung on her, absorbing all her scents, then tossed the words to him from the doorway and he was so used to her being in his head that he didn’t even know if she had spoken aloud:

“I can do strange, cruel things to you with my mind, Scott Summers. Don’t make me prove it. Now lie there, like a good boy, and wait for me to come back.”

Then she was gone and he made himself lie still and wait for her to come back, not touch himself before she gave him permission, and absolutely not go with her, even though he knew Logan would be out there prowling around, someone else who woke up from nightmares of a half-remembered past, someone else who got weak-kneed with want around Jean Grey.

 _Be a better person, Summers. The guy has had a shitty time and he saved your ass on Liberty Island. Suck it up and find a way to make it work with him. He has super-strength, super-senses, healing factor, unbreakable bones, and metal claws – if you can’t find a way to make him an asset to a team then you don’t deserve to call yourself a leader_.

 

Jean Grey had a musical voice. In fact Jean Grey had the whole damn package – smart, sexy, mysterious, beautiful. But her voice was something else, her voice had a smile in it, sometimes that smile seemed to be in her mind as well as she teased him with it, like a cat dabbing playfully at something in passing.

Logan was afraid that ‘in passing’ was all he was getting of her brain-space, too. They had practically walked into each other in a deserted corridor in the middle of the night with him bare-chested and her bare-legged and for all he knew bare-assed, too, under that long, tailored shirt of Summers’ than hung down to mid-thigh. It felt clandestine and dangerous but somehow it hadn’t tipped over into anything more even though they had circled each other both smiling with a glint in their eyes like warriors before a fight.

He was the intriguing stranger she was flirting with a little and mocking more than a little, but every time he tried to move it up, to make her admit she wanted more from him than a hands-off flirtation, she made it clear that a hands-off flirtation was all she was interested in. And yet Logan was pretty damn sure she found him sexier than Cyclops. Hell, who wouldn’t find him sexier than Cyclops? The guy was about as exciting as a freshly-ironed sheet, whereas Jean was so obviously a sleeping tiger. Summers was not going to awaken any woman’s inner animal, unless she started hungering for a lamb to slaughter….

Weirdly, once he had that thought in his head it made him a little uncomfortable. It seemed all wrong to him that a hot, passionate redhead would want to douse her sleeping fire in uptight, ice cool Cyclops and his by-the-book, follow-the-rules over scheduling, but there were the moments of vulnerability the kid betrayed, the times when he looked so young and earnest and… A nice woman like Jean wouldn’t want to muss him up. Wouldn’t want to shock him so he opened his pretty mouth cluelessly or make him swallow hard in surprise. Mystique, though….

He shuddered, his nightmare still keeping its power. Too many thoughts still reverberating of Mystique doing those bad wrong things to Cyclops while wearing Logan’s shape like an overcoat. Worse because it had been a nightmare and a wet dream at once; where he couldn’t wake up, although he was fighting to, but there was a part of him as aroused as he was appalled. The jangling aftertaste of that dream had left Logan pacing the corridor restlessly, going over their last mission as obsessively as the Boy Scout himself, trying not to think about what Mystique-disguised-as-him might have done to Cyclops if Logan hadn’t intervened when she seemed intent on stabbing him, but…what if she’d dragged him away instead of Logan? Would she have propositioned him? Smacked him around? Smacked him around while propositioning him? Touched him in all the wrong places? He stifled a growl, the thought coming to him much too vehemently that he needed to stick around and stop that happening. Mystique had already got into the mansion once. Summers didn’t like him, but he was also weirdly trusting with him. He had shown Logan where everything was with a kind of weary resignation, lending him clothes in the same manner, because Logan had lost everything when his truck blew up and Xavier said he was allowed to stay here and Logan had been useful on a mission that had Saved People and Helped Mutants so Logan was now an X-Man. If Logan walked into his room one night, Scott _might_ think Logan was being an ass not to knock but still assume he had a good reason for it until it was too late, just like in Logan’s dream. He didn’t have Logan’s sense of smell to know something was off. Mystique was stronger than Scott was. She had more than held her own against Logan and she could make her body take any form it liked and hold it. She couldn’t fake adamantium but she could fake a penis and shove it into Summers all too well….

And, of course, that was the moment when he turned around and found Jean half-naked and raising an elegant eyebrow. “House full of telepaths, Logan. You might not want to broadcast some of your stranger thoughts quite that loudly.”

“You shouldn’t be listening in. You may not like what you hear,” he tossed back provocatively, putting on that swagger that he saved just for her as he moved in a little too close.

“I tend to notice when people are thinking about Scott. Comes from wanting to keep him safe.”

Okay, that was pretty much the last thing he had wanted her to eavesdrop on. Him thinking about her naked was one thing, he had pretty much told her and Summers that he thought about her naked. Him thinking about Summers naked and tied to a bed while Mystique banged him while looking like Logan was a whole different realm of embarrassing.

“I don’t think she’d do that.” But she didn’t look positive.

“She went straight for him with her claws out – with my claws out.”

“Because he’s the team leader and if you take him out, you take out his ability to strategize – something he’s very good at. He always gets targeted on missions.”

Logan snorted. “Why – so the bad guys can sell him to some evil underwear catalogue ring?” He imagined Summers as some mind-controlled model on a crime kingpin’s catwalk, turning pertly to display the Calvin Kleins, flicking a perfectly pressed white shirt over his smooth bare torso as he did a graceful hip twist on his end of the catwalk spin. What the fuck else was the guy even good for?

She tilted her head to one side and it was hot as hell when she did that even though it reminded him a little of a falcon that had just sighted something it was about to kill. “Scott really isn’t who or what you think he is, Logan. He’s more or less the opposite of What You See Is What You Get.”

Being a guy who was more or less exactly as advertised, he resented the implication that her toyboy was more complicated than he was, because they were talking about a guy who wore sweater vests here.

“Really? Pretty boy _isn’t_ the adopted son of a doting billionaire? He’s _not_ the guy with every tricked out muscle bike, car, and frickin’ jet-plane in the garage any speed freak ever wet-dreamed about? He’s not the guy who has never known what it’s like not to be beautiful? And he’s not the guy who got the girl that every other guy wanted?”

He had a sudden uncomfortable sensation of having disappointed her. Apparently she thought he was above petty masculine jealousy – though why the hell she would think that, he had no idea. Apparently, too, she thought he was more perceptive.

She pushed a memory into his head without so much as a by-your-leave. “This is who Scott was before the Professor found him.”

Logan found himself looking at a painfully thin kid in ripped clothes that revealed way too many band-aids and bruises decorating his skinny body. He had his head down like eye contact wasn’t even an option.

Ruthlessly, Jean dropped a messy confusion in his head of a big brute of a guy screaming at him that he was property and threatening to brand his ownership on his forehead, a background hum behind the wrenching fingers in his hair and fist in his face of constant hunger and fear and pain from kicks and punches and cigarette burns and thrown furniture. He was tossed into a room where a filthy mattress on the floor was sprinkled with old candy wrappers as he tried to remember what his parents’ cooking had tasted like, all those years ago, and came up blank.

Logan flinched out of that montage and held up a hand to ward her off. There had been something different about her since the Island; she was more ruthless and more fragile at once; dangerous and sexy and not at all safe. He had been waiting for Cyclops to notice and edge away from her, but for some reason she and Summers had seemed even more glued-at-the-hip than before, even though Logan was sure there was a new fire in her eyes when she looked at either one of them. Even now, even here, when they were talking about Scott, he was hyperaware of her body heat and how it had risen a little, talking to him. She had flared with possessive fire when she had read his mind – without asking – and picked up on those thoughts of Mystique banging her boyfriend. It had made her angry and it had turned her on. He could relate. Her nipples were hard under that brushed cotton and he was having to even out his breathing not to get hard himself. Her endless legs bare and strong. They looked as if they could kick him through a wall and the woman she was now felt as if she wouldn’t mind doing that, either before or after she grabbed him by the hair and kissed him.

“Don’t think you know us,” Jean said. “I know your life has been hard, Logan, but none of us have had it easy. We weren’t always this. We have seen things and endured things that you can’t guess just by looking at us. Do you want to know how it felt to be Henry and to lose your human shape? Do you want to know how terrified Bobby was the first time he turned to ice? Do you want to know how it felt to be Storm, trapped in the dark, in the rubble, the whole weight of that house pressing down on her, dust in her lungs she was too afraid to cough out because every tiny movement made something else fall down and she could feel that roof still flapping up there, right above her, while her parents bled to death in the next room because she couldn’t get free to save them and no help came…?”

“No!” He took another step back.

Jean held his gaze. “Xavier is the third telepath to be Scott’s father and the first one who didn’t beat him, torture him, or tell him he was worthless. You don’t know me and you don’t know him.”

He was stung; angry and wrong-footed but also a little ashamed, because the connection between him and Jean was still there, a pulse of attraction between them like a heat lamp that never switched off, but so was that connection between her and Scott. _Love me, love my boyfriend_.

Logan said roughly, “Your supermodel toy boy is everything I’m not, Jean. I’m allowed to be an asshole about it.”

“You think he needs to have someone tell him he’s not all that? So he doesn’t think life runs on wheels and he’s always going to be the guy in charge, unchallenged and without doubts? You think that’s your role, here? Scott runs on doubt, Logan. He has never had a day where he didn’t wake up and want to be better than he was the day before. He has never had a night where he didn’t fall asleep thinking that he didn’t do enough that day to achieve it. It has taken me ten years of very hard work to convince him that he can do this – the last thing he or the mutant cause needs in Scott Summer’s life is someone undermining what little self-confidence he has.”

Gritting his teeth, he said, “You want me to leave? I’m gone.”

“No. I want you to stay. I just want you to stop bullying my boyfriend, who is also, in case you somehow missed it through your testosterone fog, my friend.” And at last she looked and sounded like Jean again as she put that coaxing hand upon his arm and said gently, “You’re so much better than that, Logan, and I don’t know why you feel you have to keep pretending that you’re not.”

Growling, he said, “Perhaps something about Cyclops just brings out the beast in me? And, besides, I’m not that good a guy, Red. And I wouldn’t be as much use to you all if I were. You need me to be a dick. You need me to be a thug. You need me to do the things that the Boy Scout won’t because he would never get his hands that dirty. The flipside of that is that some days I also get to be an asshole to Scott.”

Still gently, Jean said, “Logan – I love Scott. I will always love Scott. If you knew him the way I do, you would love him too. It’s not something you get a choice about – he just makes you fall in love with him….”

“Not me,” but he said it too loudly, like he was trying to convince them both.

She gave him a glimpse of shattering insecurity and need and vulnerability and courage and that fragile strength of his and that driving need to do what was right, whatever it cost him. Oh yes, there was that beautiful boy she’d fallen in love with, who didn’t even remember how it felt not to be out of his depth and yet keep doing his duty anyway. A tragic, damaged hero whom life had done nothing but dump on and yet who had never even contemplated the idea that someone else could bear this burden for a while. Who got up every day, faced his own failings unflinchingly, and then got on with the job of shouldering the weight of a responsibility that would have crushed a guy twice his age.

 _He’s also an anally retentive, uptight, humorless dickweed, who arranges his pens in descending order of nib thickness_ , Logan muttered in his mind.

But she was on a roll now, so she made him get the friends thing. How Jean and Scott had grown up together here; struggled to master their mutations in full view of the other. Cried and failed and given up and got up again and kept going even though they were too young and too scared and too out of their depths to even be doing what they were doing. The five of them had fallen down together and then helped each other up. Even if Scott and Jean had never kissed they would still have loved each other. They would still have been the other’s dearest friend.

He had never needed her help to get the boyfriend thing. He wanted to shove Summers into a muddy puddle every time he looked at him, but he didn’t deny that the guy was gorgeous. When he’d grabbed him and jerked him in close to intimidate him, he had not only completely failed to intimidate him he’d got a totally unwanted spasm of being turned on as hell by having visor boy in his hands like that. If the guy hadn’t been so annoyingly looking over his shoulder to see if he was allowed to optic blast him, he might seriously have thought about kissing him, just to see what happened. Every time they had a conversation, a part of him still wanted to kiss him, just to see what happened, not least because it would at least shut Summers up and make him look at Logan differently. As not just an asset to be deployed in a danger room scenario but as a flesh-and-blood person with a pulse.

 _He looks at me but he doesn’t fucking see me, Jeannie. And it makes me want to smack him in the mouth_.

She flicked it into his mind, like someone teasing a kitten with raindrops, that spasm of possessive rage he’d felt when that Mystique pretending to be him had gone for Summers with her borrowed claws out.

“Get out of my head!”

He had never thought that he would rage at her like that. She raised an eyebrow, just pointing out his overreaction, and he muttered defensively: “Some things are meant to be private.” _Like my weird dreams about your boyfriend being tied up, naked, by a Mystique who looks like me_.

“I just think a day never starts well when you begin it already lying to yourself.”

“Some of have to lie to ourselves just to get out of bed, Red.”

“Does that mean we really need to go through the charade of me showing you what it is about Scott that I find desirable, Logan?”

He glowered at her. “No. We can skip that part.”

Because, yes, thank you, 20/20 vision, he got that part just fine. Logan had watched Scott obliviously taking off his clothes in the showers and there had been nothing approaching a preen even though if Logan had looked like that he couldn’t help thinking he would have wanted to cast the occasional glance at a mirror just to enjoy the view. Not Summers. He didn’t seem to have a clue about how handsome he was, which had been irksome on every kind of level. Logan had watched him earnestly lecturing the kids and remaining blissfully unaware the whole time that some of them were looking at him and thinking ‘Wow’.

Irritably, Logan said, “How the fuck does anyone look like that – with _that_ body and the whole…cheekbones thing going on – and not know that he’s beautiful?”

She touched his temples and he got a sear of self-loathing: _Red Eyes! Mutie!_ A mob chasing him. An animal pinning him down and whispering in his ear that he was going to the Island where all the other little freaks were already screaming. Winters backhanding him across the face and telling him that he was the only thing protecting him from prison. Some creepy fucker stringing him up by the wrists and shoving contempt into his head: _Call me Master! Conquer your mutation, boy! Stop sniveling, you weakling!_

Flinching, Logan waved her off again. “I hate the way you telepaths do that.” But, yeah, he got that Scott had spent too many years being told that he was worthless and damaged and a freak who was fit only for a laboratory experiment not to have major self esteem issues.

“Still, he could look in a mirror, couldn’t he?”

“Every time he looks in a mirror he sees the visor – proof that he can’t control his mutation even though he is surrounded by children, half his age, who can.”

As someone with brain damage himself, Logan was affronted. “What, head injuries are a sign of weakness now?”

“What makes you think that self-loathing is in any way fact-driven or reasonable, Logan…? What do you see when you look in the mirror?”

He saw claws running with blood, and rage, and death. He saw an animal. What else? Aloud, he said, shrugging, “The guy you should be dating instead of Cyclops. Maybe you should see that too.”

She put her fingers up to his head and he flinched, awaiting the next TMI of bad memories, but she just looked into his eyes, steadily, and said, “I like you a lot more than you like yourself so you should listen to me. I have been in your mind and, yes, there is horror in there, and anger, and blood, and death, but there is love and kindness in there, too. That is the man you really are. That is the man you need to find a way to be again. And you don’t have to hurt Scott to become him. In fact you might get there a whole lot faster if you just stick to helping him. Rogue would have died on Liberty Island without you, and so would all those humans. Why don’t you think less about the things you don’t have and a little more about the things you do…?”

She left him with a regretful backward glance, full of liking, and him not quite knowing if she was one of the things he didn’t have, and never would, or might do someday. But he got the message – he had things that Cyclops didn’t, like a mutation he didn’t need a visor to control, healing factor, unbreakable bones, and super senses. And when he had worked with the guy, utilizing Cyclops’ optic blasts, they had between them been able to do what neither one of them could easily have done alone – defeat Sabretooth. He got that. He got that if he worked with the guy who had saved his life, and trusted his plan, and who thought Logan was a dick, and whose vehicles Logan kept stealing, and whom Logan thought was a dick, right back, then Logan didn’t get captured by bad mutants working for Magneto, and Cyclops didn’t get stabbed – or worse – by a Mystique in Wolverine’s clothing and neither of them ended up tied up, sold off for spare parts, or dead. So, not the best plan ever, because that would have involved them never having to interact at all, but still a decidedly better plan than them squabbling like six-year-olds to everyone else’s annoyance.

So, he wouldn’t jeer about the fact that Jean Grey was getting her supposedly grown up boyfriend hot chocolate at 3am. He wouldn’t think about what Summers probably looked like in pajamas. Or think any more about Jean’s endless legs under that heavy cotton shirt. He would just check for his own piece of mind that Cyclops wasn’t being molested then go back to bed, and try to sleep, and try not to dream about Mystique fucking Summers in a Logan-shaped way, and tomorrow he would even turn up to that stupid training session that Summers had told him so annoyingly to attend.

 

Jean came back into the room pensively, carrying mugs of hot chocolate and slid under the covers without even seeming to notice that she had floated his mug over to him and made the covers rise and fall to let her in just with the power of her mind.

“Scott, you have some way of telling if Logan is Logan, right?”

He caught his steaming mug as it wafted past. “As opposed to Logan being, what…? A dick? Because, if so, then…no. I really don’t.”

“As opposed to him being Mystique pretending to be Logan and looking to stab you again.”

“Mystique doesn’t smell like beer and cigars.”

Jean turned onto her side. “Oh really? You know what Mystique smells like?”

“I know she doesn’t smell like Logan.”

The oddest expression flickered over her face. “So you know what Logan smells like?”

Scott didn’t really have to think about it, that musky odor had been in his nostrils since the guy arrived: beer, cigars, engine oil, and an earthy scent that always made him think of the outdoors, pine resin mingled with the wolf enclosure at the zoo. He had fine tuned that scent very carefully with the hard-light technology in the Danger Room, needing it to be accurate, because it was one of the markers he relied on. Although, since he had come back from Alkali Lake, Logan smelled a little like the Alaska Scott had lost along with his parents: like wide open spaces and ice cold winters and the bears coming in for the seal meat. The Logan in his dreams – because sometimes Logan intruded on his dreams – was even more vivid. He smelled of loneliness and sorrow and an ache of his forgotten past. Sometimes he was kinder and gentler than the real Logan and Scott would wake up feeling unaccountably wrong-footed around the real one, because the Logan in his dreams had given him some cryptic advice in a dark corridor or touched him on the arm as if he cared.

Sabretooth smelled more like hungry, wet mountain lion, and grizzly bear, and spent semen; like he was always angry and post-coital and always turned on. Scott had smelled him first when the guy was pinning him down in the school Scott had almost destroyed, his claws perilously close to his face, and although Sabretooth had mutated over the years, the animal within growing bigger and stronger and more evident as his rational mind retreated, his scent hadn’t changed. He still blazed like a forest fire, giving off a dark smoke of rage, and every time he shoved any one of them against a hard surface, Scott would be aware that his prick was wet at the tip and already hardening at the prospect of their screams. After seeing the claws and hearing the snarl, Scott had expected Logan to smell of that same suppressed rage, but he didn’t. He smelled more wistful somehow, as if he was yearning for something. Probably his forgotten past.

He never articulated the scents he attributed to people because he knew they were idiosyncratic and subjected to any rational analysis they probably didn’t make a lot of sense. His scent and hearing weren’t as good as Hank’s or Logan’s were, but he had possibly had to rely on them more, so he inhaled people when he met them, the same way he listened to the pattern of their footsteps and the rustle of their clothes. He noticed when they touched him if their hands were larger or rougher or softer than his. Tied up in unfamiliar surroundings with his glasses stolen from him it was sometimes the only way to tell which bad guy was in the room with him; the one who had smelled like formula, the one who had a reason for being here that wasn’t necessarily to do with being bad, or the one that smelled of burned skin or blood or gunpowder. The one who had already killed once.

Jean kissed him unexpectedly. “Your brain needs an off switch.”

He sipped his hot chocolate, the picture of docility, because, since Liberty Island, and perhaps since Logan, they had begun to find a way to make it work for them: his uptight, prudish side. In the past it had hurt or frustrated or exasperated her, but lately, they had started role-playing it, daringly. She played fierce, the woman who wasn’t going to be taking ‘no’ for an answer, while Scott let himself be tugged and pushed wherever she wanted him, sometimes just with the power of her mind. Finding control over himself had taken ten, slow years, but giving up control to Jean in the bedroom had come all too easily.

“You probably could switch it off if you wanted to.” He took another innocent sip of his innocent hot chocolate, enjoying the dark sweetness as it rolled over his tongue.

She plucked the cup from him and straddled him. “Be careful what you wish for, Summers. Maybe I can make you have such a good time I put you in a coma.”

“Promises, promises.” He couldn’t help looking around to check that she put their hot mugs down on a flat surface and on a coaster.

“I’m going to punish you for that,” she warned. It ran through his body again – that flicker of fear of how powerful she had become and excitement at how she could do anything she wanted to him. She leaned in close and whispered in his ear: “What happened in the Danger Room when you programmed Logan in there?”

“He’s fast.”

She ran her fingers up under his t-shirt, fingertips counting his ribs as if she thought he might have misplaced one, tracing the line of his muscles. “And?”

“And strong.”

Her hand slid down, tracing the arrow of his pelvic bone; slid lower still. “Stronger than you?”

He swallowed hard. “Yes.”

She pulled the t-shirt off over his head and tossed it aside. “Did he hurt you?”

“Yes.” That came out in such a tight, breathy gasp that it sounded as if he’d needed it, somehow, the proof of Logan’s superior strength, the reassurance of his dominance.

She leaned in fast and kissed his throat, like it was taking all the self-control she had not to bite it. He swallowed and felt her mouth follow his gulp down his throat before she licked along his collarbone. “Did you like it?” Her hand between his legs made him jolt and gasp.

“Jean!”

“I’m not going to be gentle with you, Scott. Not if the Logan in the Danger Room wasn’t.”

His voice rose high as she tightened her grip. “We weren’t doing…that.”

“Pity. I might have liked to watch if you were.”

“Jean!”

She kissed his shocked open mouth. “You are too easy, Summers.”

Primly, he said, “I’m a one-girl boy.”

Her hand curled around his skull pulling him in for a deeper kiss, a hungrier kiss than he was used to from her. “But the one girl you’re dating is a telepath and we telepaths can be very unscrupulous.”

He was still kissing her back too gently because he had never learned how to be any other way in bed. She was the one who’d taught him literally everything he knew and as she hadn’t known that much herself back then, his knowledge was naturally limited. He knew how to be careful and gentle and the right way to use his fingers and his tongue, and to do what she said, because it was her body he was touching, and he was a man and heavier and stronger than she was. Except, she was stronger than he was now. So much stronger than he was. And she was and wasn’t the Jean he had first met. She was more restless and more dangerous and she excited him in ways that other Jean hadn’t done, and frightened him considerably more. She had gone out loving and come back loving-and-aroused, carrying a whiff of Logan’s scent with her, because Logan turned her on. That animal inside him that made Scott bristle up like a cat meeting its first unruly dog, that sense of chaos and unpredictability and lack of self-discipline that conflicted so maddeningly with his own hard-won self-control, that inflamed Jean as much as it exasperated him. He had been afraid she might choose between them and not choose him. Now, it occurred to him for the first time that she might not feel required to choose. This newer, darker Jean might not see a reason not to have both.

He said, “You wouldn’t make me have a threesome with a guy, would you, Jean?” He made it sound like a joke because in the past it would have been a joke, because of course she wouldn’t, Jean Grey was careful about never using her telepathy to overpower his will, and Jean Grey didn’t do threesomes. Jean Grey didn’t do anything naughty and neither did he.

She was still wearing his shirt as she tugged off his sweat pants with her mind and straddled him, but she pulled it off over her head and tossed it to the floor while he tried not to mind that it was going to be creased in the morning as she began to rock over his hardening cock, tightening her grip on his hair, and pulled him in for a deeper, harder kiss. He could feel her careless strength, the heat coming off her body. She smelled like fire and water. She smelled the way a star-filled sky looked, magnificent and far away. Her skin was sheened with want, slick against his body, and he could only hope it was him she wanted, and not Logan. It was his body she was straddling, his hips her fingers were bruising, then his thighs her thighs were rubbing against; his chest her hand was pressing down on as she flattened him to the bed.

She said indistinctly, “Oh, so you’d be okay with a threesome with another woman, would you? Is that Storm or Emma Frost? Or both of them? Because I think Emma is deeply committed to the art of pegging and I’m not sure Storm isn’t that way inclined herself, so you might find it a little uncomfortable if they were both having you at once.”

He gasped because she was fondling his cock with her free hand, none of that past shy Jean just gently stroking him to arousal, proud of her own daring as she did so. This was a Jean who knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it. He was also trying so damn hard not to think about Emma Frost and Ororo doing rough things to him in bed while wearing boots and nothing else while Jean dropped those totally inappropriate images into his mind, teasing him with them like a cat with a string. He closed his eyes as if that would stop him seeing them like that, trying not invade their privacy even though it was just a fantasy, not real at all, the laced bodices and the whips and the long, bare legs in the impossibly high heels, manicured fingers touching him, nails drawing red lines in his skin and that tease along his thigh and across his buttock of that jutting, gel-covered…no.

“I’m not that kind of boy, Jean.”

He was trying to make it a joke, like the way he made fun of his own adherence to rules and regulations and timetables while the kids groaned and rolled their eyes at him, but fondly, because if he was boring he was at least reliable, and if it said on the timetable that he was teaching algebra at 2pm on a Wednesday then 2pm on a Wednesday would always find him in the algebra classroom with their homework marked and the dull, necessary lesson prepared. Because these kids needed that, in a world where they couldn’t rely on their own bodies not to betray them or their own families to go on loving them; they needed teachers who showed up on time. They needed something in their lives to be boring and reliable. Except, it wasn’t quite a joke now, because he really wasn’t that kind of boy although he was starting to get both scared and aroused by the idea that this new version of Jean might just force him to be that kind of boy, whether he wanted to be or not.

“What about you and Hank and Warren…? You three always did take a suspiciously long time showering in the mornings.” And she dropped another image into his mind of them all naked boys together, kissing and touching, Hank’s wet fur and Warren’s wet wings, soft and warm against his bare skin, even though it hadn’t been at all like that.

Her squeezing and stroking was keeping his voice an octave higher than it should be but he managed to gasp out: “That was Warren’s…wings.”

“Now I’m picturing the two of you with hair dryers trying to get his flight feathers fluffed.” She leaned in and kissed him again, teasing his mouth with hers and whispered in his ear: “I could make you be that kind of boy, Scott. Would you like that?”

“I trust you.” He barely stifled a groan, gasping again as she climbed onto his cock, steadying herself on his shoulders and it excited him far too much when she used him like this, like something she was going to fuck herself with selfishly, telling him he wasn’t allowed to come yet, not until she let him.

She seated herself slowly, a taunting slide, slipping over him like a hot, tight sheath, nipples hard as she kept hold of his hair and pulled his face in. He opened his mouth to mouth at her breasts and wondered just for a moment if she had trained him to this or if she was making him do this. And did it matter when this was Jean and he trusted her and she would never make him do anything he didn’t want to do?

“Maybe you shouldn’t trust me…” She nipped his ear playfully as she squeezed his cock with her perineal muscles in a way that made him groan and clench helplessly. “Maybe you should run away from the big, bad telepath, and see if the Wolverine will keep you safe instead.”

She was rocking on him now and he moaned and grabbed at the bedhead to steady himself as she moved with swift, agile strokes while her mind clamped hard onto the base of his cock, keeping him flushed and pleasure-licked, but not able to climax whatever she did.

“Only if the guy learns how to shower,” he retorted.

That seemed to be the right answer, because Jean grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him off the bed onto the floor, tumbling him down to a bruising fall onto the carpet. The fall knocked the breath out of him and he gasped, winded for a moment, but she breathed for him, mouth fierce on his, air pushed into his lungs. As he recovered, she pulled them over and over in a breathless roll then forced him down on his back again. She straddled his cock with her head back and her hair bouncing as she rode him hard and fast, like he was a conquered country, like he was her private domain. As she rode him, she leaned down, pressing his shoulders hard against the floor, teasing his mouth with her tongue as she whispered: “I might make you have a threesome with a man, Scott. I might even make you like it.”

And he felt a twinge of something that felt unaccountably like anticipation.

 

In the corridor, Logan grabbed the wall because the scents and smells and words and sounds coming off those two was like a cloud of Spanish fly. Jean being rough with Scott in bed – and on the floor – was not something he had seen coming, and it made him hot and angry at once. Scott being so fucking passive was less unexpected but way more arousing than he had ever imagined. His thoughts were a tangle of: ‘Damnit, Jean, you are wasted on that Boy Scout! Try a man who could meet you halfway!’ And ‘Christ, Summers, is there anything you _won’t_ let a woman do to you in bed…?’

Jean was horny and insatiable in there; three fucks away from shoving more than just a finger up Summers’ uptight little ass. Scott gasped when she did anything not completely vanilla to him; shocked she was doing it and shocked that he liked it. It was like watching a nymphomaniac banging a schoolboy and yet they had both been on the same starting line not so long ago. This was about three months away from Jean having her own sex dungeon or Scott being dragged off to wife-swapping weekends; ones where every wife was a dominatrix and the men wore collars and spent a lot of useful time on their knees. And maybe Scott would be up for that but Logan felt a strange urge to rescue him and do nicer, gentler things to him, perhaps while teaching him new tricks gradually so the sex dungeon wouldn’t come as quite such a shock.

He desperately wanted Jean to take out some of her lust on him and a lot of it was alpha male competitiveness and good old groin-deep arousal but there was just that unaccountable twinge of protectiveness towards Boy Scout Summers, too, who, after all, didn’t have healing factor and maybe shouldn’t be having his body used quite this roughly or his nice, clean, virtuous little mind having its doors of perception crowbarred open quite so wide. He thought this wild-haired, flame-etched version of Jean might make the guy take a PhD in depravity when he was still trying to get his merit badge in Nice Sex For Nice Boys and Girls in the Suburbs.

He heard Scott gasp, “Oh God, Jean…!” And it didn’t sound like he was begging for her to stop in there, or like he wanted to be rescued at all, but it also sounded like he was about five fathoms out of his depth and drowning fast. He wondered what thoughts Jean was trailing through Scott’s mind so mockingly as she fucked him; he wondered if any of them included him.

Logan pushed himself off the wall, not finding it easy to walk in his current condition but determined that whatever else happened he wasn’t going to jerk off in the corridor of a school. He made the difficult journey back to his room, breathing with the kind of control even Summers could only commend, and then shoved a chair under the door handle as he made for the bed.

His thoughts were tangled as he tried to fall from orgasm into sleep as fast as possible, not wanting to in any way examine the fact that he had just got off to his dream scenario revisited, except this time Mystique had gone from being Jean riding Summers, hard and fast, to being the real Logan, this time, not a shape-shifter in disguise. That wasn’t so bad – he had been throwing provocative looks at Summers since he stepped over the threshold, had almost told him straight out, that he was just the kind of pretty boy a real man rubbed one out to from time to time as he thought about teaching him who the real alpha male was here… except it hadn’t been like that when he was bringing himself off with firm, steady strokes. Instead, he had been the one cradling Scott’s head in his hand as he kept his weight off him so he wouldn’t get bruised; and he had been the one who slid into him so carefully that Scott had uttered a soft sigh of pleasure as he arched his back so willingly into the first gentle thrust.

 


End file.
